My Theory on the Media and the IRS Scandal

May 13, 2013

RUSH: You know, I’m watching Obama’s press conference here and a reporter, after Obama and the British prime minister give their opening statements about whatever it is that they’re trying to distract everybody with, the reporter stands up and says, “Mr. President, I want to ask you about the IRS problem and I want to ask you about Benghazi and then, Mr. Prime Minister, I want to ask you about Syria.” And I was surprised the British prime minister didn’t take the IRS question. ‘Cause Obama’s not president at times like this.

(imitating Obama) “The IRS, I didn’t know about it any sooner than you did. I didn’t know about it ’til I read it in the papers on Friday. I found out about it the same time we dumped that scandal to overcloud Benghazi. I didn’t know about it and it’s reprehensible, and I don’t support it, and I don’t think anybody ought to support it. You know, there’s gonna be a Republican presidency someday, and we don’t want them having this kind of power.”

Greetings, folks, great to have you. Rush Limbaugh here back behind the Golden EIB Microphone at the distinguished and prestigious Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. The telephone number if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882, and the e-mail address.

I gotta tell you, over the weekend I was in Kansas City. George Brett, my good friend, surprise 60th birthday celebration all weekend long. He’s actually going to be 60 on the 15th of May, on Wednesday, but his wife, Leslie, put together this grand surprise weekend. It was at a country club plaza section of Kansas City. There was a restaurant/bar called Coal Vines. And the place was sardine city. It must have been two or three hundred people in there. I’m stunned George didn’t find out about it. They kept the secret. They kept the surprise. He walked in there at 7:30 and was totally taken aback.

I stayed in one spot for four-and-a-half hours. Fortunately it was outside on the little patio so I could light up my cigar. There were all kinds of people. You know what question I got more than any? “Why is the media all of a sudden defending conservatives?” The question that most people wanted to know from me was why in the world is the media defending conservatives on this IRS business? You know, the IRS story breaks Thursday or Friday, and the media immediately jumps on the IRS and Obama as well. You would not believe the collection of Drive-By stories that I have today quoting prominent Drive-Bys. I mean, Tom Brokaw, Joe Klein, they are all comparing Obama to Nixon. Why, folks, that’s the worst comparison a president can have, as levied by the Drive-By Media.

I must admit for a while that I, too, was a little confused by this. There were some people who theorized, “Well, they dropped this IRS thing because what they really want to do is hide Benghazi. The thing they’re really worried about is Benghazi, and so they dropped this IRS business on Friday in order to distract everybody from Benghazi.” Now, the president just addressed Benghazi, too, and it was like we live in an alternative universe. There’s no “there” there. There’s no cover-up. Those talking points, we didn’t rewrite those. Those talking points were everything I was getting in my daily brief five days after the event. Susan Rice didn’t say anything that I wasn’t being told by the intel.

It was outright, utter denial. No “there” there, he said. There’s nothing to see in Benghazi. Nothing happened, except four Americans died and we’re outraged by it and we’re gonna make sure it doesn’t happen again. Next question.

Now, it’s gonna be interesting to me to see just how eagerly the media follow up on any of this. I can guarantee you, if it were a Republican president and this IRS story had broken or Benghazi they wouldn’t be using sanitized terms in the questions, sanitized language. They’d be going for the jugular. And there’s a little bit of a cushion here because the British prime minister is standing next to Obama, and he’s gotta be included in all of this so they can’t really focus everything on Obama, which is part of the structure, I’m sure.

But let me give you my theory, because it is a good question. Let me also remind you that when any number of events have taken place that you thought might be the tipping point that would cause low-information people to alter their thinking on Obama, maybe the bloom is off the rose. I say, folks, it isn’t gonna be a major event. It’s gonna be something like Obama dissing Justin Timberlake’s latest CD and ticking off the low-information crowd. This IRS thing may be it. I don’t know. It’s too soon to tell. But I’m gonna tell you, I was as amazed as you were because, look, you know and I know that the objective of the Democrat Party, the objective of the Republican establishment, the objective of the media is to wipe us out, in a political sense.

Their objective is to neuter all conservative opposition and anything that does that is okay. Any lie, any smear is fine, anything, anything goes. In this world of politics, their objective, Obama’s particularly, is to eliminate all opposition. You know as well as I do that they consider conservative opposition the thing that animates them the most. They are more animated in getting rid of us than they are any terrorist group out there. They literally despise us; I’m talking about in a political sense. And so it would be logical to assume that when the IRS story breaks and you find out that the IRS is targeting Tea Party groups and conservative groups, the natural conclusion is that the media would support that and encourage that. Instead of looking at the IRS, would take the ball and run with it and start examining the Tea Party groups. Are they in fact not tax exempt? Should they be disqualified?

In the normal ebb and flow of things, that’s what would happen. IRS says, “Well, these groups, we’re not sure if they’re a legit. These conservative Tea Party groups, and these pro-Constitution groups and these pro-limited government groups, they may not be.” Normally the media would take that, run with it, follow the lead, and start examining all of these Tea Party groups to find out if indeed they were legit or illegitimate and they would find they’re illegitimate and seek and destroy. The exact opposite thing happened. The IRS is under assault now. And here I think is the reason why. I really think in this case the media and the left have no choice. The public, of all government groups, agencies, bureaucracies, the IRS is the most feared and arguably it’s the most hated. But the left needs it. They need the IRS. They need the IRS collecting the revenue and the money to fund big government.

They need the IRS and the tax code. They need to save the IRS. They need to save the tax code. In addition to that, don’t forget that the IRS is now the collecting agency — the collection agency — for Obamacare, which they’re entirely invested in. So I think what this is, is a concerted effort to clean this up and sweep it away and get rid of it as quickly as possible. You have the collection agency of the regime, the collection agency of socialism, the collection agency of big government.

It’s got to remain intact. It has to remain functioning. It cannot proceed wounded. It has to be at full strength. So when something like this happens, there’s no to point in trying to defend it. That’s just not gonna work because the public is simply too oriented against it, even the low-information crowd. Now, from our perspective, folks, I think what this does is prove just how rotten big government is. None of this should be unexpected. None of it should be.

The idea that the IRS does this doesn’t surprise anybody, does it?

When you get down to the brass tacks of things, nobody is really surprised the IRS does this. Nobody is surprised when they hear that presidents use the IRS. Everybody’s heard of the political audit. In my Stack of Stuff, I’ve got two or three examples of Obama administration-targeted audits of Romney donors, which I will share with you as the program unfolds before your very eyes and ears today. Now, as to the idea that the IRS information was released on Friday to take the heat off of Benghazi, that’s Michele Bachmann’s theory, and it could be correct.

But I think what, again, is fascinating to me is Obama. In answering the question, he wasn’t president. (impression) “The IRS? Oh, that’s some other organization! I got nothing to do with that. I’m just like you; I’m just outraged.” The fact of the matter is, the IRS has heard Joe Biden liken Tea Partiers to terrorists. I’ve got the quote. Joe Biden, at a Democrat fundraiser two years ago, called Tea Partiers “terrorists.” You know as well as I do all of the defamatory rhetoric that’s been aimed at Tea Partiers by Obama administration people.

They’ve been called “the Taliban wing of the Republican Party.” Now, the IRS, they have people in there and they want to please their bosses. Have you noticed also, by the way, they’ve blamed the whole scandal here on “low-level workers”? Have you noticed how they’re trying to blame the IRS scandal on low-level workers. It’s just like they tried to blame Benghazi on low-level workers, just like they tried to blame low-level workers for the immigration people releasing all those thousands of illegal alien criminals.

The Obama regime really looks out for the little guy, doesn’t it? They’re always blaming the low-level people. They’re always blaming little guy, the people they claim to champion. Man, I wouldn’t want to be a low-level worker for this regime, ’cause you’re always gonna be the fall guy if anything goes wrong. Plus, it makes it look like here (if you listen to Obama and people in his regime) like it’s all these low-level workers out of control. It’s all these low-level workers that are creating the havoc and doing all this dirty, partisan stuff.

And, of course, these low-level workers, they’re just rogue! They’re on their own. They have no guidance. They have no bosses. Well, you and I know exactly what goes on. You know as well as I do what it’s like to be targeted as a conservative, and you know as well as I do that there are little liberals in every bureaucracy who are in it for the cause and don’t need to be told by Obama to target Tea Party groups. They hate them independently. They hate them regardless what Obama says or what Biden says.

So none of this is unbelievable. None of it’s outrageous from that standpoint. The problem is, it’s totally believable. The problem is, it’s entirely understandable that this kind of thing goes on. This is what people think presidents can do with the IRS. In fact, it’s what people think does happen, that political enemies are targeted for harassment via this agency. So when we had a news story about it, there’s anger, of course, but not a whole lot of surprise.

The big surprise has been the media joining our side in this story, and that’s what people have been scratching their heads about.

So that sets the table. We’ve got a lot to discuss on the program today. Benghazi, IRS, the Obama press conference — we rolled tape on it; you’ll be able to hear the president himself, all the details. This IRS thing is big, and there are so many things that have happened in the past. We went back to the archives and dragged them out to remind you, to show you that this is not uncommon, to show you that this is not really anything new. It’s just a real, concentrated, undiluted, easy-to-understand example of it, which is also helpful.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So here’s the sound bite, folks. This is the president after his opening statement and the opening statement by the British prime minister, David Cameron. It was a joint press conference today. It was the AP White House correspondent Julia Pace who said (singsong voice), “Mr. President, I wanted to ask about the IRS and Benghazi. When did you first learn that the IRS was targeting conservative political groups?

“Do you feel the IRS has betrayed the public’s trust, and what do you think the repercussions for these actions should be?” And here’s Obama. I want you to keep in mind the Limbaugh Theorem. He’s not president when things like this happen. He’s against things like this. He’s trying to stop things like this. What his policies are have no relationship to what is happening in the country.

OBAMA: I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this. Uh, I think it was on Friday, and (stammering) this — this is pretty straightforward. If in fact IRS personnel engaged in the kind of, uh, practices that have been reported on —

RUSH: They did!

OBAMA: — and were intentionally targeting conservative groups —

RUSH: They were!

OBAMA: — then that’s outrageous, and there’s no place for it.

RUSH: Right.

OBAMA: If you’ve got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and nonpartisan way, then that is outrageous, it is contrary to our traditions. Uh, and people have to be held accountable, and it’s gotta be fixed. So, uh, we’ll wait and see what exactly, uh, all the details and the facts are. But I’ve got no patience with it, I will not tolerate it, and we’ll make sure, uh, that we find out, uh, exactly what happened on this.

RUSH: Right. So we’ll keep a sharp eye on this — and his lack of patience with it and his lack of tolerance — and we’ll see how quickly it is that he finds out exactly what happened, even though we already know what happened. Here’s the thing about this. The media and practically everybody had to be dragged kicking and screaming to this. Don’t forget, now, that it was persistent Tea Party people who were making noise about the unfair requests being made of them.

And, folks, it’s not just money that the IRS is collecting. The IRS is out collecting information on people. I want you to hang with me for the whole program. It’s gonna take a while to unravel all of this. I’m gonna try to use the old Shakespeare bromide, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” I don’t want to take an unnecessary length of time to do it, but there’s a lot to glean here. But if it hadn’t been for Tea Party groups persistently saying, “Hey! Hey! Look at what’s happening to us over here,” we’d never know this.

The Republican Party didn’t get into gear on this. It was Landmark Legal Foundation and some other legal groups that persisted in sending letters to the inspector general and the IRS demanding that this be looked into. This is not something easy. It has not been easy to get to this point. It was like extracting teeth, however you want to characterize it. I don’t want to make the mistake of saying the media is on our side in this.

The media is not on our side. The media’s always gonna be on the side of the Democrats; they’re always gonna be on the side of Obama. Their effort here is to essentially limit the damage to the IRS as much as they can. There are just certain things they know, the media, that the public is not gonna accept no matter how the media treats it. So they get in there and limit the damage as much as possible, because the IRS has to remain functioning and dominant in their world.